Wednesday, August 19, 2009

The word flammable, meaning easy to set on fire, derives from the word inflammable, meaning… easy to set on fire. The reason flammable was created was because people thought inflammable meant not-flame-able.

But where did inflammable come from?

My guess would be that it derives from the word inflame, meaning… to set on fire. This use of the in- prefix is similar to inflate and increase. The reason inflate and increase didn’t get a similar treatment is probably because flate is far enough from float to be considered different words, and we associate crease with a different meaning (to fold neatly) then we did back then (probably “divide” or “make greater”. Apparently, crease actually derives from the Latin word crea, meaning to create.)

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

You may have noticed some regular outages over the last half-year of my website at http://makk-b.sitesled.com/. There seems to be major problems up at SiteSled’s end, and I’ve been hoping that they’d get ironed out if I just weather the tide.

The most recent problem hasn’t limited your ability to look at it, but my ability to upload stuff – in fact, most stuff seems to be broken – FTP, HTTP upload, the forums, their wiki…

Apparently, hopefully, they’re fixing their ongoing problems:

It is true that we've experienced several extended outages, and communication has been spotty. The current software has been in use on SiteSled and our other free hosts since 1998, and is no longer supported with updates. This has caused several issues, which we are still working to solve.

[…]

We have been installing a new software suite that will allow us to offer a wide range of additional features on SiteSled.com and it's new sister site. We hope to be able to port over the old sites, but this has not been confirmed yet.

We will try to keep you informed, but again, our current software has very limited communication abilities.

We appreciate your support through the rough times, and hope to provide you with additional services in the future.

If this is true, it’s much appreciated (and a long time coming :D). Hopefully, this will all sort itself out, but if not, I’ve been researching both free and paid hosts. Although moving really is a last resort (since I’m lazy and don’t want to have to send everyone along to the new site. ^^)

--MarkKB

Update 14/07/2013: After going up (and staying up) for a bit, it seems that Sitesled is now dead for good. :( My new website can be located at http://www.markkb.com/.